I read this tweet on Twitter few days back (not exact wording but very close):
“Would you marry someone whom you have hardly spent any time with?”
The first thing that came to my head was the frail relationship between Terry and Candy in Candy Candy.
Granted, both of them had dreamt of their future as a couple, and the image of raising a child with Terry flashed across Candy’s mind when she was heading back to Chicago after their breakup in New York. Actually, that was a heart wrenching picture. Candy was fully aware that her future with Terry was doomed.
However, let’s be objective and fair for the sake of discussion. How much did Candy know Terry? In fact, he didn’t know much about her either.
In the manga, most of the time they were bantering, and the kiss they had shared resulting in slapping each other in anger and frustration. Why? She hadn’t been ready yet, still grieving the tragic death of Anthony. And what did Terry do to her? He returned the ‘favor’. Why? He couldn’t stand the insult of being slapped by a girl or what?
In short, neither had opened up to each other about their past or feelings, and I wonder why? It seemed that they had both intentionally kept things to themselves. Candy had discovered by chance that Terry was the illegitimate child of the Duke, not because he had revealed it to her. On the contrary, Candy had always trusted Albert. She had told him many things that she hadn’t told others.
After being framed by Eliza, Terry and Candy had gone separate paths. When they reunited more than a year later in New York, both had changed. If you read the manga closely, they didn’t really have much to talk about other than their ‘good old days’.
One might argue that Terry had been afflicted by Susanna’s accident, but come to think of it, even without Susanna, Terry and Candy didn’t belong to the same world any longer. One was a thriving Broadway actor and the other was a hardworking nurse. They needed some time to get to understand each other a bit more if they were serious about being together.
Therefore, if I were Candy’s friend, I would have persuaded her to wait and see if Terry was really the right man for her.
I will talk more along this line later. Stay tuned. 🙂